Maelstrom has announced that Ron, known online as “MacGyver13,” is the fourth recipient of the Maelstrom Bitcoin Grant program, in accordance with a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine. Ron is working on silent payments as proposed in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 352.
“We are thrilled to support Ron financially on his mission to integrate silent payments into his Bitcoin wallet,” said CFO of Maelstrom Arthur Hayes. “Many merchants and users want to provide/display a single static address that is not altered. This is an important, valid and simple use case. With silent payments, this is still done, but reuse of on-chain addresses is avoided. Reuse of addresses is the Goldmine of the monitoring organization.
In September 2023, a silent payment was proposed by Josie Baker and Reuben Somsen. This creates a single static address for people to post tips without sharing with friends, using them for donations, or sacrificing privacy. This eliminates address reuse, an important method used by surveillance companies to track user behavior on blockchain.
“There are a lot of software projects, and perhaps with Bitcoin, taking an idea from a proposal to a fully adopted solution is the most difficult part,” Josie said. “We are excited by the progress we have made in the short time we’ve been working with Ron and are thrilled to help us adopt silent payments with the aim of protecting our users’ financial privacy while creating an intuitive and seamless user experience.”
Bitcoin privacy depends on using new addresses. This often requires a sender to the recipient interaction. Existing static address methods use notifications that increase costs and leak metadata. Silent payments avoid both interaction and notifications, but you need a wallet to scan the blockchain. The use of multi-party inputs has not yet been proven to be safe.
Silent Payment is aimed at implementing it.
- Zero Transaction Cost Overhead
- There is no possibility of a link between payment and a static address
- No sender required to receiver interaction
- Privacy tools and compatibility with the latest wallet features
“My main focus is coordinating development and testing efforts within a growing community dedicated to integrating silent payments into desktop and mobile Bitcoin wallets,” says the new grantee of Maelstrom Ron. “By proceeding with silent payments along with Bolt12 and BIP-353, we aim to enhance privacy, simplify the user experience and host ways to adopt Bitcoin more broadly as a payment solution.”
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